Marion Carpenter
LITR 5535: American Romanticism
Instructor: Dr. C. White
September 30, 2003 

All In Spirit:
Hauntings as a Gothic Mode in Romantic Literature 

At first glance James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans seems to be the least gothic work to come out of the American Romantic movement, but to accept this as truth without analysis would undercut the creative forces that culminate in the depths of Cooper's savage wilds. The complex weave of gothic elements lies buried in the dark waters and hidden trails of Cooper's war torn wilderness. Cooper employs the correspondence between place and man that both Edgar Allen Poe and Washington Irving use to convey suspense capturing a darkness both within and without.

In the works of both Poe and Irving, everything has a memory–a history–places are haunted by their inhabitants, and even by the thoughts of those who pass into their dark recesses, and like Poe and Irving, Cooper's world is the same way, pulsing with a flow of memories and histories that rise up out of the very land.

"The Fall of the House of Usher" is a sterling example of haunted spaces, though Poe creates sterling examples with an ample supply of encrusting black tarnish and jaundiced discoloration. The house itself, not unlike its proprietors, is shrouded in gloom and decay. "Minute fungi" covers its exterior and hangs in web-like tangles from the eaves. The stonework is porous from years of stagnation and isolation while rot and decay have removed its strength and integrity, but fortunately the lack of interaction has left the structure in tact. It is filled with dark intricate passages, carved ceilings, somber tapestry-hung walls, ebon floors, fantastic armor, and lofty rooms with long, thin, pointed windows (too high to be reached from the floor) that cast reddened moonlight through their cage-like trelliced panes. The narrator further expands this beyond even what is perceived to a pervading darkness that seems to invade the space, "...the eye, however, struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles of the chamber, or the recesses of the vaulted and fretted ceiling." The surroundings even saturate his senses, "I felt that I had breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. ...irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all." "Usher" ultimately collapses, but not from the decay, in essence the narrator himself causes the fall of the house, but then, that is indeed what the narrator has been summoned to accomplish. "It was thus that he spoke of the object of my visit, of his earnest desire to see me, and of the solace he expected me to afford him." If the narrator fails to give Usher the peace he seeks, he prompts it to advance more speedily. The haunted nature of the house gets stronger the longer the narrator remains with the Ushers. Roderick as depicted from the narrator's memory, in grotesque perfection, is likely the most disturbing man alive or the most beautiful walking corpse to ever stalk the earth, "a cadaverousness of complexion; an eye, large, luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of surpassingly beautiful curve... hair of more than web-like softness...", but his deterioration is worse yet more beautiful as the narrator relates it to us face to face, "...now ghastly pallor of the skin ...now miraculous lustre of the eye.... The silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow all unheeded, and...floated rather than fell about the face, I could not, even with effort, connect its arabesque expression with any idea of simple humanity." The lady Madeline is identical to her brother in appearance, and they share "sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature" which inevitably alerts Roderick to the tragic end of his sister. It is this sympathetic bond that continues to haunt Roderick to his untimely demise, though some might argue the timeliness of his end from his description.

In Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", haunted places exist for the wretched schoolmaster's own musings, though his thrills cost him when faced with the authentic specter of Sleepy Hollow. A fan of Cotton Mather's writings, Ichabod Crane finds it a delight to consume everything marvelous and frightening. He reads Mather's "History of New England Witchcraft" avidly after letting out classes, reclining in the clover beside a whimpering brook. From these direful tales, he heads home through the dusk.

"...to the farmhouse where he happened to be quartered, every sound of nature, at that witching hour, fluttered his excited imagination: the moan of the whippoorwill... the boding cry of the tree toad... the dreary hooting of the screech owl, or the sudden rustling in the thicket of birds...."

Crane is unable to consume enough of these tales with his "capacious swallow." "Another of his sources of fearful pleasure was to pass long winter evenings with the old Dutch wives...and listen to their marvellous tales of ghosts and goblins, and haunted fields...brooks...bridges...houses...and particularly of the headless horseman..." But in story form, Ichabod can relax and take solace, while getting the adrenaline rush his walks home must have brought him as he'd let his fancy run free all the way back home from such sessions. This ritual of haunting himself turns against him when he leaves Van Tassel's winter party.

"The night grew darker and darker; the stars seemed to sink deeper in the sky, and driving clouds occasionally hid them from his sight.... In the center of the road stood an enormous tulip-tree... Its limbs were gnarled, and fantastic, large enough to form trunks for ordinary trees, twisting down almost to the earth, and rising again into the air.... he thought he saw something white, hanging in the midst of the tree... but on looking more narrowly, perceived that it was a place where the tree had been scathed by lightning, and the white wood laid bare. Suddenly he heard a groan... teeth chattered...knees smote against the saddle: it was but the rubbing of one huge bough upon another...."

The stories from the parties and his own haunted imagination casting spells on his fragile mind, Ichabod continues fearfully, finding himself joined by an unsavory riding companion, he tries every opportunity to escape ineffectively, "...mounting a rising ground, which brought the figure of his fellow traveler in relief against the sky, gigantic in height, and muffled in a cloak, Ichabod was horror-struck, on perceiving that he was headless! –but his horror was still more increased, on observing that the head which should have rested on his shoulders, was carried before him on the pommel of the saddle...."

Cooper, likewise, makes these associations of dark and haunted pasts and supernatural presences. Hawkeye is a very superstitious man and at many times in the course of the narrative he points out the dark fearful things that the others have missed, or increases the fear by piling on his own superstition. At once, holed away in a cavern at the start of their journeys "a cry, that seemed neither human nor earthly, rose in the outward air, penetrating not only the recesses of the cavern, but to the inmost hearts of all who heard it." Hawkeye and the Mohawks cannot immediately ascertain the creature that made the noise. Hawkeye goes so far as to despoil any hopes he'll have the answer with his forthcoming reply, "I did believe there was no cry that Indians or beast could make, that my ears had not heard; but that has proved that I was only a vain and conceited mortal!" The sound repeats and Hawkeye starts to feel the uncertainty growing stronger, "...I have heard that when such shrieks are atween heaven and 'arth, it betokens another sort of warfare!" Duncan manages to assure them, once in the open air, that the sound in question is that of a horse screaming in fear for its life. Later, memories haunt the mind of Hawkeye as he leads the group back from captivity at the hands of Le Renard Subtil.

"After penetrating through the brush, matted... with briers... he entered an open space, that surrounded a low, green hillock, which was crowned by the decaying block-house.... ...one of those deserted works, which, having been thrown up on an emergency, had been abandoned with the disappearance of danger, and was now quietly crumbling in the solitude of the forest, neglected, and nearly forgotten...."

The dead lie there, and the enemy will not disturb the dead when they come seeking Hawkeye and the others. Thus history serves as a haunting defense against the enemies of the present. And moreover, the shores of a pond, stained with the blood of the enemies of the past bring back yet more haunted memories to the scout. He recalls the events and shares them openly with the group,

"If death can be a surprise to men who are thinking only of the cravings of their appetites. We gave them but little breathing time, for they had borne hard upon us in the fight... there were few in our party who had not lost friend or relative by their hands. When all was over, the dead, and some say the dying, were cast into that little pond. These eyes have seen its waters colored with blood, as natural water never yet flowed from the bowels of the 'arth.... Hist! see you nothing walking on the shore of the pond?"

Duncan objects that no one could be as misfortunate as them to be on the pond, when Hawkeye retorts, "Such as he may care but little for house or shelter, and night dew can never wet a body that passes its days in the water." This signals how deeply superstitious, and presently frightened, Hawkeye is, fortunately the form he sees is a French sentry watching the path, and Heyward converses their way on with his fluency in the language, only to have the sentry join his compatriots in the waters of the little pond at Chingachgook's hand, thus adding another spirit to those still, stained waters. Hawkeye s not the only haunted character in Cooper's work though, Cora Munro is haunted as well, by the actions of her father on Le Renard Subtil. The pursuance of her captivity by Moqua brings the Mohawks and Le Renard into conflict repeatedly, all over his disgrace at the whipping post. Worse yet, his disgrace brings about The Massacre of William Henry, as he incites the Iroquois to bloody levels in order to grab Alice and lead Cora away into the woods after her younger sister. A living spectre, Le Renard Subtil haunts Cora and Alice directly with his vengeful actions, and in haunting them, so haunts the man responsible for his pain, their father.

From the pervasive, psychological haunting of Poe, to the imaginative, supernatural haunting of Irving, to the realistic, explainable haunting of Cooper, associations are drawn between the haunting and the haunted. The gothic hauntings of his predecessors echo in Cooper's narrative. But Cooper goes a step beyond the mysterious fear factors Poe and Irving maintain, with each essential correspondence between the perceived and physical hauntings that envelop Hawkeye and the others, Cooper offers straightforward explanations that resolve the questions and doubts of the party. Poe leaves it to the reader, and Irving makes multiple conjectures, allowing the reader to fancy as he sees fit. Cooper is slowly cutting his way into a new genre of literature. He may still have one foot in the grave, but he's in excellent company.